If this prestige season’s cavalcade of book-to-movie adaptations achieves nothing else, it should put to rest the concept of the “unfilmable” novel.

Life of Pi, Cloud Atlas,The Hobbitand On the Road had long been deemed resistant to celluloid due to complicated plots and locations, yet the first three are in theatres and On the Road arrives Jan. 18.

There are also new screen takes on Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (now playing) and the musical based on Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (Dec. 25). And all this follows an already notable year for adaptations that soared (The Hunger Games) or sank (John Carter) at the box office.

Movie directors are either more adventurous than they used to be or new computer tools allow their imaginations to run wild. Or maybe something else altogether is happening.

To find out, the Star convened a small discussion with two Canadian writer/directors who have experience in turning pages to pictures: Mary Harron and Kari Skogland.

Harron tackled the highly controversial Bret Easton Ellis bestseller American Psycho (2000), which so outraged feminist groups for its depiction of violence against women, they threatened to picket theatres showing it. In a quieter vein, she also made a film of Rachel Klein’s teen vampire novel The Moth Diaries (2011) and she’s currently working on a Lifetime TV movie, The Anna Nicole Smith Story.

Skogland took on a cherished CanLit classic, Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel (2007) and the difficult secrets of IRA informer Martin McGartland’s Fifty Dead Men Walking (2008). She’s currently working on the screen version of Prisoner of Tehran, Marina Nemat’s memoir about growing up in Iran.

The conversation was a conference telephone call, with Harron in New York, Skogland in Toronto and me, Star movie critic Peter Howell, acting as inquisitor and instigator.

Howell: It’s been a big year for book-to-film adaptations and also for ones that few though would ever happen. You have both had experience with so-called “unfilmable” novels, so let’s talk about that first. Is there really such thing as an “unfilmable” work of literature?

Harron: There are adaptations people like and adaptations people don’t. I think American Psycho was probably the easiest script that I ever co-wrote; it was actually the fastest one. . . . The narrative was kind of abstract and strange; it didn’t have a straightforward plot, so I guess that made it harder. But it had such amazingly natural-sounding dialogue that it made it easy. The harder thing to do is turning a real-life story into a film.

Skogland:The Stone Angel spanned several decades and it’s a woman reflecting on her past and her past mistakes. Because it’s so literary and so intellectual at some level, as a book I think it was quite inaccessible for many people. So the goal was to take what was an iconic book, a loved book by many Canadians, a much-hated book frankly by many who couldn’t sit down and read it or felt they were forced to in high school, and make it accessible in a story that also would not confuse it. I agree with Mary: working from a great source makes it so much easier. . .

But you do at one point have to close the book and go, “All right, now I’m no longer making the book; I’m making the movie.” . . . You want to keep the soul of the book intact, but you also want to drag it into the world of a movie, which you have an hour and a half to tell what might be an epic story over a century.

Howell: Does it challenge you or terrify you to turn a popular or iconic book into a film? Or perhaps both?

Harron: When they first asked me about American Psycho, I said, “I don’t know whether you can make it into a movie. So let me try.” I didn’t really want to commit to directing it until I had written the script. It was scary that they wanted me to commit. With American Psycho you had a lot of very graphic violence that I didn’t think it would work on screen because it would be too literal, you know? . . . You just take the parts you like and juggle them around until you find a narrative.

But I would be scared of adapting something like Anna Karenina — or Crime and Punishment, which is my favourite novel. How are you going to make better in a movie what’s in the novel? I don’t know that I would want to go there.

Howell: How much respect do you have to show the source material? With something like the Harry Potter movies, novelist J.K. Rowling demanded strict fidelity to the page. Other authors, maybe not so much.

Skogland: When dealing with Margaret Laurence, of course you have to respect her. It makes your life easy as well as hard. The trickiest thing was, when I rolled that movie out, the critics probably had a spotlight on it differently because it was a classic. Instead of looking at it like a movie, they looked at it like the book.

If I didn’t serve the book, and in a couple cases I made some choices, it kind of came back and haunted me in a couple of reviews — which made me think, “Wow, this guy is being very literal!” I had to have her hair black? Whatever. That’s the sort of danger. Folks who have lived with the material so long can’t really see an interpretation of it, and by definition that’s what you’re going to do.

Howell: Mary, you had a different experience with The Moth Diaries. You have the expectation of teenage girls for a modern novel that many have compared to the Twilight stories.

Harron: It was kind of the arch-version of a teen novel, in between an adult and a teen novel. It was quite a sophisticated teen novel. But in that case it was more ambiguous: was it real or was it not? It was very much in (the protagonist’s) head and that made it even harder to adapt. . . .

Think of the most famous (adaptation), The Godfather. I don’t think anybody would claim The Godfather is a great novel. In some ways it’s easier to adapt something which has a lot of narrative drive. The hardest is the internal things, when you’re trying to dramatize inner conflict. And on another note, in both American Psycho and The Moth Diaries, there’s a question at the end of: is it real or is it not? I didn’t write the novels, I’m just bringing them to the screen, so I like the fact that I didn’t quite know what the intent was of the original material.

Howell: You’re saying that you don’t feel the need to put an ending in a film that wasn’t there in the book.

Harron: I like open-ended things because to me they kind of stay and haunt me. Quentin Tarantino said a great thing once at a Q&A session after a film: “If I tell you what it means then I take it away from you.” It’s their experience. And it’s my experience reading both those books. Interpretations aren’t definitive.

Howell: How much latitude does a filmmaker have in adapting a book? Can you remove or add characters and remove or add scenes?

Skogland: It all has to be fair game. I just adapted a book called The Prisoner of Tehran, based on a true story. The issue with that is, of course, you have many characters who can be explored in a book. In a movie, you don’t have time. You have to amalgamate perhaps five characters into one and I don’t feel that is at all taking huge license. I feel that’s a way to interpret the story as it comes to life for the screen. You can still explore the emotions and the story and the overriding story arc of what those characters represent.

Harron: I think combining characters is fair game too, really. You just have to make it for clarity’s sake. So I’m pretty comfortable doing that. I think you can do that, however, without majorly changing the meaning of it, without huge plot changes.

Howell: How much can you change history? Are you comfortable doing that?

Skogland: I don’t. Authenticity for me is not only the objective but the mantra. But what you can do within those dates is be able to tell the story. As long as that is your mantra and your goal, authenticity and the truth, within the truth of it you can nuance the — I want to say, the sequence of events — so you can make it fit the story that you are now finding yourself having to tell in a condensed period of time.

Harron: One thing that’s always annoyed me when I see biopics is people whose stories I know. I remember seeing a Patsy Cline biopic years ago but the real story was so much more interesting. I find that when Hollywood in particular adapts a life and they veer away from the facts, they go into a Hollywood template. Which is just the same story they always tell about the rise and fall of the stars. The person’s life fits into that fixed mold.

Howell: There seems to be greater willingness to experiment these days on the part of both filmmakers and moviegoers. But are there still necessary things to do when adapting a book to film and things to avoid?

Skogland: Well, you have to make sure you’re even willing to go down the road, because it may be a very long road. In The Prisoner of Tehran, I started that project four years ago and I’ll make it probably this fall. It’s a lot of going to the altar — there’s been 37 drafts. I’m sure Mary’s had the same thing.

Harron: Yeah, getting too caught up in detail, that’s what I did.

Howell: When you know a story too well, can you overthink it when making a film?

Harron: That’s the problem with the labours of love, you know? The things you’re most passionately attached to sometimes are the hardest to do because you’re too embedded in it and . . . if you’re filming another person’s script, “oh, thank god I didn’t write it!” In some ways it’s like I don’t have to get all caught up in what I’m attached to.

Skogland: What you can do there is just fix stuff. That’s what I do, when I’m writing someone else’s work then I can just put my fix-it hat on. Then we can make it work this way and whatever. That’s kind of a nice place to be. It’s not necessarily easier but it’s easier to spot problems with your own script.

Harron: You somehow have to immerse yourself in the world of the book though, and sort of feel the internal rhythms of it, the internal structures of it . . . you kind of have to absorb it. So I dunno, maybe there’s not an efficient way to do it.

Howell: Can you both give me an example of book-to-film adaptations you think went really well?

Harron: The David Lean Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Great Expectations. Those are brilliant. Those are long books.

Skogland:One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Ken Kesey is hard to take to the screen.

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